I've Got Your Number: A Novel

3.5/5.0

I have been waiting for a new Kinsella novel for a while now and then I almost missed it. Only by accident I found out that there was a new book coming out last Thursday. I pre-ordered it a few days before it was released and had it in my mailbox on Friday. I started reading yesterday afternoon and just finished it. The second I started, I was hooked. Sophie Kinsella has an amazing talent to start in the middle of the story but in a way so that you feel you know the main character after the first few pages as if you would have known her for ages already. This could also have been a Shopaholic novel since Poppy, the main character, resembles Becky Bloomwood extremely in the way she is behaving and reacting. Perhaps that is also the reason why I loved this book so much. The story is totally independent but Poppy also ends up in weird situations that she could have avoided and manages to deal with these situations in an extremely comical and entertaining way – just like Becky. Sophie Kinsella even makes footnotes, something I usually hate, a real pleasure to read! Those where the best footnotes ever and a fantastic idea that winds through the whole story and even becomes part of the story in the end. Normally, footnotes are extremely annoying because you have to leave the main text in the middle of a sentence just to read something completely different at the bottom of the page and then you are completely lost and have to search for the place within the text where you stopped to initially look at the footnote. But in I‘ve got your number it is totally worth interrupting the main text to have a look. Another thing I noticed lately is that more and more authors use emails, chat- and text messages as part of their story. This is a really modern way of telling a story but fits into our modern world perfectly. Real life shows that in love stories modern forms of communications play a massive role – especially in times of smartphones. Kinsella adapts to this modern development and creates a great story of two people getting to know each other through emails and text messages to an extend that they know a lot of each other even though they have not met a lot in real life. Kinsella also tries to explain the female behaviour in different situations of life. While men are usually pretty straight forward and directly say what they think, many women mean something completely different when they say or write something. Women tend to find the deeper meaning in everything a man says or writes and do not get that it might be just what he said. Perhaps it would be helpful for men to read a Kinsella once in order to understand their female counterparts better… on second thoughts… they might also think we are all as crazy as all of Kinsella‘s protagonists so better not… On the other hand, the dangers and disadvantages of this form of getting to know each other become perfectly clear in this novel. A text message or an email are just what they are. They are shorter than the spoken word and they can be misinterpreted in many different ways. This can make getting to know each other even more complicated as it might already be. In the end, what I really enjoyed with this book was that it was so extremely well plotted. Every single detail is important for the story and will add up to the whole picture at the end. But when you finally think you got the whole picture with all its little details, it ends up differently again. This ending is in a way predictable but in the same way it is surprising and amusing. I am not going to give it away because I think everybody should find out themselves and I do not want to ruin it for anyone. More of my reviews can be found here: http://booksaroundtheworld.wordpress.com

Ok aber nothing special